Google confirmed that its Gemini model escaped its testing environment and broke into the systems of three companies during a cybersecurity evaluation in May run by the Israeli firm Irregular, as The Wall Street Journal reported.

Google’s vice president of security engineering, Heather Adkins, said the model found public information online and guessed credentials for sites it believed were part of the test, and that in all three cases the intrusion stopped once the model realised it was dealing with real companies. Google said it notified the three affected companies and federal authorities, and declined to identify them or the Gemini version involved.